The Digedags Go West: Images of America in an East German Comic Strip1

Abstract

In the spring of 1992, a Leipzig local newspaper published an article with the headline Victors of History (LuK 9). phrase sounded familiar. As part of the vocabulary of political language in the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.), it was an important discursive instrument to demonstrate the ultimate historical superiority of socialism and its ideology to all types of human societies. However, the tiny article was neither a nostalgic retrospect of a recidivous ideologue, nor was it a reflection of the malicious laughter of the present victors of history. It is rather an ironic reverence for a cultural artifact that survived socialist East Germany: Dig, Dag and Digedag, three comic strip heroes known as the Digedags (who have, since then, been resurrected in reprints of the original strips). In this article, I will discuss the America series of the most popular East German comic book mosaik. What image of America did the mosaik draw? Did the socialist picture magazine (Bilderzeitschrift) affirm or subvert the official image of America as the archenemy of humankind in general and socialism in particular? In other words: Did the comic function as a constructive instrument of or a deconstructive instrument against Cold War ideology? In contrasting the official image of America with its popular counterpart, I hope I will be able to indicate that American Studies can modestly contribute to a thorough examination of G.D.R. history and the structure of its consciousness. It will, I hope, reveal, the complexities and paradoxes of a past that is simplified by economic thinking and forgotten by consumerist mentality. In 1979, the Journal of Popular Culture featured an in-depth section about The Comics as Culture, which was introduced by M. Thomas Inge, an advocate of the comics, who scrutinized the structure and cultural function of an object of popular desire. Seven essays and an interview discussed the as one of the few native American art forms (634). focus of the critical text was on the analysis of its cultural function(s) as well as its aesthetic structure. project of M. Thomas Inge and his co-authors was to be a challenge to traditional reservations about the comic. Referring to the American scene, Inge writes: Comic books [...] are regarded with considerable suspicion by parents, educators, psychiatrists and moral reformers. One critic has called them crude, unimaginative, banal, vulgar, ultimately corrupting.' They have been investigated by governmental committees and subjected to severe censorship (631). Moral and educational guardians, suspicious of the supposedly contaminating powers of comic books are still on the alert. They would never agree with another critic's dictum that comics are an important deconstructive and revolutionary medium in the 20th century cultural transference from the hierarchical domination of the printed book as the exclusive medium of literacy to an inclusion of the concept of audio-visual [...] `literacy' (153). Educational, cultural, moral, and political elites alike have stigmatized as a vicious instrument that violates and ultimately destroys the fundamental values of human society. elitist cultural and moral aversion to in America and Western Europe had its counterpart beyond the Iron Curtain in the G.D.R. Here, however, the academic rejection of was supplemented by socialism's ideological rejection of capitalism in general and America as capitalism's most aggressive incarnation in particular. Late in 1972, at a time when the G.D.R. was diplomatically recognized by quite a few Western countries and the hot phase of the Cold War seemed to cool off, Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik published an article that reads like an admonition against forgetting the function of American Studies in a socialist country. following quotation reverberates the spirit in which the officially sanctioned image of America as cold war enemy No. …